The First Test
by ShiningMoon
Summary: Written as an entry for the prompt "First Time" at the Zevran thread at BSN. After hearing so many cries of, "I still remember my first battle!" the Warden decides to ask Zevran what, precisely, this first battle entailed. 2.5 hours. One-shot.


"Spill it."

"Mm? What is it I am to be spilling, Warden?"

"You heard me ask," she grunts. "You're always going on about how it—how you 'still remember your first battle.' Why?"

He weaves his fingers behind his head and leans back against a crate of supplies. "Why not? You do not remember the first time your blades sunk into flesh?"

"No." This isn't true, because weapons were never really her _thing _and hunting aside, she wasn't sure she'd ever done any actual _stabbing _prior to Howe's invasion, so of _course _she remembered the ugly angle of the blade through the throat of the bastard who cut Iona down. She unsheathes her dagger and sets to removing fresh darkspawn blood before it begins to cake.

"Hm," Zevran raises his eyebrows, disbelieving. "Very well—if you must know…"

...

There were, of course, many tests.

On his fourth week he was given his own dagger.

It shouldn't have been a mystery, how to use it—really, it shouldn't have, but he tried holding it blade-out and blade-in and maybe there was some _secret _that nobody was telling him—some secret about swishing it just like this or just like that.

Nobody ever told him what was going on, but he was smart enough to know that if somebody gave him a dagger, and if somebody was training him about things like not-dying and killing-people and whatever else they had bought him for, then he was probably going to have to use that dagger sometime soon, whether he wanted to or not. He would practice flipping it across the room, trying not to imagine that he was brought here to become one of _them_, trying not to imagine the dagger lodging itself in the back of someone's head or whatever other nasty places assassins put daggers. And then he would dash after the dagger, in case somebody just then burst in, because he really, _really _didn't want to have to do something _they_wanted him to, but he also really, _really _didn't want to die. None of the other people in his room (just as wide-eyed and shaking and curious about how _do_they get knives so very _pointy_) seemed to pay him much mind. They kept a wide distance from the path of the knife and came and went and curled and uncurled. He wondered if he could get by okay just curling and uncurling himself—long enough to figure out how to get _out_of here before these Crows made him one of them.

And of course Zevran was most suspicious that something would sneak up on him during the darkest point of the night that followed—all the other young ones asleep, he himself almost drifting off as he gave up on throwing his dagger and resorted to practicing simple stabbing on the thin walls (they are walls, he told himself, not people, because if he can help it, he will _not_ be stabbing people, because he is _not _an assassin and they are _not _going to do that to him). Maybe someone on the other side would have minded all the stabbing, but the nearest someone was busy making their own noise. It was a comfort, in a way. He felt a little like he was at home and tried to imagine the woman's voice was Stefania or Lana or one of the other whores. To those sounds, his eyes drifted shut. Sounds of life. Sounds of living.

…Until a faint rattling woke him abruptly. He could feel the insides of his ears shaking before his hands were, all fear and panic in the night because he still couldn't throw the dagger in that perfect way and _this was a test _and _they were coming_ and he really, _really _didn't want them to make him one of them but if he had to hurt someone just this once so that tomorrow night he could hear the quiet chatter and the soft nighttime noises and all those other thing that life was, then, well, maybe…

So he crept up and around the other children to the entrance—would they even come in through the door? And he waited there, sweaty fingers making it difficult to grasp the handle of his dagger. He bit the dagger between his teeth and wiped his palms furiously on the sack-cloth shirt they'd given him. _Don't mess this up, Zevran Aranai_, he thought to himself, and repeated his name a few more times (for good measure, and because it made him feel better to think of the things he still had)— _Aranai, Aranai, Aranai, Aranai, Aranai glad something bad didn't happen to me when I fell asleep? Aranai glad I heard them? Aranai glad they gave me a dagger?_ He wasn't, really—wasn't glad at all that he was still trapped here and now having to think about _stabbing_things—but the thought made him snicker.

The rattling came closer and now he could hear it: in the ceiling, just above him. He wondered if maybe they planned on bursting down through the ceiling—could they do that? Maybe he could do it first and satisfy them without even having to fight. No, he decided, that was a bad idea; how does one go _up_through a ceiling? Instead, he crossed the room back to the other side and leaned out the window. He could hear the rattling from here, too.

_This is a test_, he thought to himself. _They said they kill people who don't pass tests. Dying is bad. I'll live long enough to get away._

So he kicked his well-worn boots off, tucking them beneath what passed for his pillow, and eased himself out the window, toes curling around the edge to help him keep his grip. He chanced a glance downward, into the open air sandwiched beneath the soles of his feet and the street. _This isn't so bad,_ he thought, _just…scenic_. _Very scenic. Very very very very scenic. _He had learned that word from the women at the whorehouse—they always said that since their building was right by the fish market, it was scenic. Scenic like a view of the life of a real Antivan, they said, and he figured scenic was actually a word for things that were much less nice than you wanted them to be. Some of the Crows had said the view from their high position was nice. It was scenic, then, Zevran thought—it, too, was much less nice than they wanted it to be. They were stuck like he was stuck and like he would be stuck forever if he couldn't get away…but for tonight there was mainly the matter of not-dying.

The window to the floor above him was not so far up. He stretched his fingers and wedged them into a groove just barely out of reach, and, gulping up a deep breath, held that grip just long enough to swing his other arm higher, driving his dagger into the wall. Zevran thanked the Maker that the walls were of weak enough stuff that even he, all scrawny little bones with no muscle to speak of, could shove it in far enough to make it stick. He swung his arm up to the next ridge, gripping at the top of the windowsill below him with his toes, and looked down at the slightly more scenic view before continuing on this way—_stab, climb, stab, climb, stab, climb_—and then, mustering all his will, swinging into the window.

"We pick you up as children because children will do stupid things," one of the Crows had told him shortly after purchasing him, like he wouldn't remember it anyway. Zevran wondered if maybe this was one of those stupid things. It beats dying, he told himself, if he can make it—because _this was a test_and he'd heard enough times that with these Crows, tests sometimes meant _dying_. The ones younger than him didn't get it—what was there besides living? But he couldn't explain. He only barely understood it himself, bad things happening and then someone is just _gone_, forever. Not-living. Dead. And he would get out of here before it happened to him and he would get out of here before he had to do it to other people.

After he slid onto the floor from the window frame, he paused to wipe his hands against his shirt again. He took one last glance out the window—_very, very scenic_—before returning his attention to the room.

It was odd: it was empty. But no—there was a rustling, something in the shadows hidden behind crates of supplies. In his short time here he had seen Crows melt out of the shadows and out of spots too small for them to fit into—to come into being out of _nowhere_. Zevran crept forward, dagger in hand, ears trained to the crates. Was this what assassins did? He quickly loosened his posture just in case. He wasn't an assassin. He was just going to catch whoever was attacking him before they even did it.

But just as he leaned over the stack of crates to inspect it—somehow, though he couldn't even make out the forms of the crates in the pitch-black of the corner, he was thrown backward to the floor with a solid _whump _that was surely audible from downstairs. He lurched up, waving his dagger madly, searching for the source of the attack. "Come out!" he squeaked through a tight throat. "I know you're here and I…I…" He was holding the dagger right and everything; wasn't that good enough for them? He climbed up from _outside_. Couldn't the test be _over_? He was Zevran Aranai and he knew how to not-die.

The sound of mad skittering echoed from behind the crates piled around the room, and as a shadow hurtled toward him Zevran was toppled with another _whump_.

And this time, the person stayed on top of him, pinning him down, eight small, sharp little daggers pressed into his chest. Through the dark he could only hear both of their breaths, feel the bloodcurlding heat from the man sitting upon him, see a massive shadow that _reeked _of…_something _even through the heavy scent of leather that permeated all the rooms and buildings here. He winced and squirmed beneath the weight.

"No!" he sputtered. "I can learn! I swear! Please, have mercy!"

An indignant reply: "Whuff."

It was a large dog.

...

"Uh-huh. You, as a child, fought off three Crows, the same day you were given a dagger to practice with," the Warden finishes polishing her own dagger, holding it up to the fire for inspection. "You're full of nug shit."

"It is true. What can I say? I have a natural talent."

But the Warden's mabari flattens his ears, beady eyes narrowed, and gives an exasperated huff. The Warden's expression is not terribly dissimilar.

"Yes, okay, I will tell the truth," he gives the dog a pat on the head. "My first battle was against a dog much like this one—why it was in the young Crows' apartments, I never learned—and I lost. In my defense, he licked me quite fiercely. There was little I could do."

"Atlas could do better," she shrugs and smirks at her dog. "Couldn't you, boy?" He yaps and wriggles his rear with much excitement.

"I believe you," Zevran raises his hands defensively, eyeing the dog, "let us not test it, hm?"

"Fine." The mabari sits back down and the Warden exchanges a look with him. He supposes they are planning something. It would be fitting, he supposes—to feel that he was leaving the Crows the same way he came in: a mabari pinning him down and himself unwilling to pull a dagger.

Zevran leans toward the Warden. "Now you owe me."

She lifts her eyebrows.

"The story of your first battle."

"Not now." He shrugs and leans back, closing his eyes. Having a few of his own _ask me laters_, he knows better than to press the issue. "And Zev—"

"Mm?"

"If you're going to brag about a battle every sodding time we get into a fight, I recommend choosing one you _won_."

"What do you mean?" He lifts one eyelid. "I defeated three Crows in two minutes with one dagger."

The Warden smirks. "Of course."


End file.
